I have created a new Facebook group < https://www.facebook.com/groups/211088459089836/ > for comments about men captured during Market-Garden at Arnhem in the autumn of 1944. Many wounded officers from this operation were sent to Spangenberg and Rotenburg from October 1944.

This blog is in effect an archive about the two camps. News of recent activity is on my Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/87940621644/ and therefore you should join this group to keep up to date with discoveries and colleagues’ comments.

Gustav Venema, the farmer at Guttels. In March 1945 was serving with the Luftwaffe at Detmold as the commander of an aircraft observation post. Guttels was where Colonel Edlmann recorded Lieutenant Peter Conder Royal Signals, Lieutenant John Cripps King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Lieutenant Ralph Pilcher Welsh Guards, Lieutenant Basil Rought-Rought Royal Norfolk Regiment and Henry Morgan sheltering after their escape on day 1 of the march.

Thank you Irving Dunn for the information and these two photographs of his father-in-law Herr Venema.

Recent additions from my archive to the Oflag IX A/H and A/Z Facebook page includes a pass issued to civilians living in the Rotenburg school buildings in late 1945, and a then and now picture of the Kalkhof, where the Rotenburg men spent Saturday evening and some of Easter Sunday 1945.